Bafana Bafana captain Ronwen Williams is optimistic that they can make it out of their group at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.
South Africa discovered their World Cup opponents in a draw held in the USA on Friday evening.
Bafana were placed in Group A alongside Mexico, Korea Republic, with the final team to be decided through the UEFA playoffs between Denmark, North Macedonia, Czech Republic, and Ireland.
SA will face Mexico in the tournament’s opening match, a rematch of their 2010 encounter, which ended 1-1 at FNB Stadium.
Williams says Bafana won’t just be going to the World Cup to add numbers—they want to see how far they’ve come.
“It’s nice to play against the host nation because of course the country will get behind them,” said Williams on SuperSport TV.
“There’s a lot of familiar faces that we will be up against. South Korea, there’s some players that we played against at the FIFA Club World Cup, who play for Ulsan HD.
“Yeah, I think it’s a fair group, a good group, one that we believe that we can go and get out of that group.
“You can never say where you gonna get points and where you gonna drop them. Every game has its own challenges, we will go out to each game believing that we can win it and get results.
“We don’t want to be there to just add numbers, we wanna see how far we’ve come as a country and believe that we can do wonders.
“We don’t want to put pressure on ourselves, this is our first time in a very long time to be part of that prestige tournament. We believe that we’re capable of getting out of that group.”